'TV opera?' You bet.

We owe Chicago Opera Theater tremendous thanks for dragging the smaller operas of Benjamin Britten out of the closet of neglect to which American opera companies have long consigned them.

This weekend, COT is performing another rescue mission on behalf of one of the great British composer's most neglected stage works, his penultimate opera "Owen Wingrave."

"Owen Wingrave" will receive its first professional performance in the city Saturday night as the third and final opera of COT's spring festival season at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance at Millennium Park.

If the production is anything as good as COT's previous Britten stagings -- most recently, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in 2005 -- you won't want to miss this rare sighting.

"Owen Wingrave" began life as a television opera, in which form it had its world premiere as a 1971 BBC telecast throughout the British Isles. Britten and his librettist, Myfanwy Piper, based their work on a short story by Henry James, whose more famous ghost story, "The Turn of the Screw," had inspired an earlier Britten opera of the same name.

The composer's lifelong pacifism found expression in the story of a young man with strong pacifist convictions who refuses to pursue a military career in defiance of family tradition. Britten was said to have been moved to operatic action by the 1970 National Guard shootings of students at Ohio's Kent State University protesting the Vietnam War.

Critics and commentators have long been unkind to "Owen Wingrave," and its reputation as a deeply flawed work has helped make it a stranger even to British stages since its premiere.

Among those who believe the opera has taken a very bad rap is Steuart Bedford, Britten's longtime conducting assistant. It was he who led the first stage performances of "Owen Wingrave" at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, in 1973, and it is he who will conduct COT's Chicago premiere.

Bedford suggests the small-screen origins of "Owen Wingrave" have contributed to its black-sheep status among the Britten operas.

"To get a satisfactory appreciation of an opera, you don't want to see it on a small box for the first time," says the British conductor, who led the world premiere performances of Britten's final opera, "Death in Venice," in 1973, because the composer was too ill to do so. (He died three years later.) "Except for Menotti's 'Amahl and the Night Visitors,' I can't think of another opera written for television that's been a success on the stage."

Nevertheless, the work is eminently stageworthy and in fact contains some of Britten's finest musical invention, says Bedford. This includes the ballad of the Wingraves that begins the second act and Owen's (sung by baritone Matthew Worth) rhapsodic soliloquy about the true nature of peace. The composer's use of percussion, inspired by his long fascination with Balinese gamelan music, is especially striking here.

Bedford says he feels privileged to conduct COT's American premiere of composer and Britten associate David Matthews' chamber version of the score. Covent Garden commissioned the reduction for a revival of "Owen Wingrave" in 2007. It brought this late Britten work more into line with his chamber operas, lightening the heavy scoring that tended to drown singers and prevent smaller venues from taking up the work.

COT's cast will include tenor Robin Leggate as Gen. Philip Wingrave, Owen's stiff-backed grandfather, and soprano Rebecca Caine (the original Cosette in "Les Miserables") as Mrs. Coyle. The show reunites director Ken Cazan and designer Peter Harrison, who also worked on COT's Bartok "Bluebeard's Castle" in 2007.

Britten, according to Bedford, was as exacting in his personal relationships as he was in his music: an intensely private man who nevertheless lived openly with his life partner, tenor Peter Pears, through the long period when homosexuality was illegal in Great Britain.

"Ben was only difficult if he felt you were not doing what he wanted musically," says Bedford. "If you followed his particular requirements, he was fine with you." The conductor concedes that "very few people survived being very close" to the hyper-sensitive Britten; those who went too far found themselves ostracized from the inner circle.

Still, Bedford adds, "He was extremely good to me, perhaps because I took care not to be one of those moths who got too close to the candle!"